On Fri, Oct 10, 2008 at 9:33 AM, Dmitry Butskoy <buc odusz so-cdu ru> wrote:
> The problem was at an initial point, when Fedora was considered "for
> enthusiasts only". A lot of previous "RedHat Linux enthusiasts" just switch
> to CentOS (and similar RHEL-based systems), no more using Fedora, because
> "it is marked as a non-for-production system even by its creators".
Well, in all fairness, Fedora's stated goal is to advance the state of
free software. You get that by being bleeding-edge. Unfortunately,
being bleeding edge also means not being suitable for production
environments - these are two fundamentally incompatible goals. This is
why Red Hat Linux split into two - Fedora and RHEL. RHEL is a
derivative distribution of Fedora.
> As a result, the amount of Fedora-testers in real production environments
> significantly decreases. Fedora development seems to be focused on Desktop
> and some conseptual things now, rather than a real "production" life.
There's plenty of stuff going into Fedora aimed at production systems.
Take for example FreeIPA for one. It started life in Fedora quite a
while back, and is now Red Hat Enterprise IPA. That's just one
example. Others are:
SELinux
LVM2
Xen
Tickless kernel (I'd bet good money we'll be seeing it in RHEL6)
We're also working on getting Spacewalk into Fedora, which is neither
aimed at desktop users nor a "conceptual" thing. Fedora exists to
foster innovation, with this mission sometimes comes breakage. We
simply want to prepare folks for that.;
> Perhaps some marketing people assume that "production" implies the purchase
> of RHEL and commercial support, rather than trying to use some
> free-of-charge system, because such a system should be unstable for
> production environment. But people do not want to pay and they use CentOS
> instead..
That's fine. The problem is not "marketing" that Fedora is viewed as
unstable for production use (and let me clarify the word production
here - something that you need up 24/7/365), it's technical. As I
stated before, the stated goals of Fedora are incompatible with
production use as I have defined it.
.
> This situation seems to be reflected in the Fedora project itself. Guess,
> how many Fedora infrastructure servers are run under the latest "stable"
> Fedora release? Maybe some previois release? How many key people work under
Not many, they are mostly RHEL (actually none that I personally know
of, but I think that the systems that create livecd's have to be if
I'm not mistaken), for exactly the reasons stated before.
> Fedora Desktop "all the time"? (Maybe RedHat employees of them are compelled
> to use RHEL Desktop in basic working hours?)
I'm not a Red Hat employee, but I'm pretty sure that they aren't
"compelled" to do anything. And lots of developers that I know run
rawhide all the time. A quick rundown of my machines at home:
Main desktop: Fedora 8
Main laptop: Fedora 9
Testing laptop: rawhide du jour
VM server: RHEL5.2 (may change this to F9 and kvm in the near future),
experiencing some weird Xen issues relating to Fedora testing.
DNS/DHCP: CentOS 4.6
VM's - depends on what they do :)
> And finally, when you will discover the actual situation, ask yourself --
> why Brasilian should use Fedora (and Fedora-based RHEL), when even Fedora's
> fathers do not use it for anything real?
Define "anything real". Of course it's used for real stuff. I'm
writing this on my F9 laptop right now.